"And now my martyrdom will begin! I shall have all the Spiritualists against me, in addition to the Christians and the Sceptics. Thy will, oh M., be done."
Helena Blavatsky (1831-1891), the mystic responsible for a substantial amount of modern New Age beliefs (and, incidentally, Sergei Witte's cousin), wrote this in her scrapbook in New York in the 1870s, recording an "order received" from one of her hidden masters to begin telling the public the truth (she, among other things, revealed that the spirits of the dead contacted by mediums are more like residual shells). It is the most diagnostic sentence she ever set down, not even because of the occult machinery (there's plenty of it in her other works), but because of what she does with the prospect of universal opposition. She does not dread it; she announces it, savoring in advance the role of the one against whom all sides will turn. She clearly enjoyed seeing herself in the role of the persecuted prophet. This is the archetypical EIE role: the maker of doctrines and movements who needs to stand at the burning center of other people's passions.
A good witness for her character is Colonel Henry Olcott, who co-founded the Theosophical Society with her, living and working beside her for seventeen years:
"She was a woman of most intense nature, possessing powerful combative temperament. She was one of those persons who make bitter enemies and devoted friends."
The words "intense" and "combative" both point the same way. This is the EIE's emotional combustibility, recorded in the Talanov trait list — the capacity to love and to hate more strongly than the people around her, the easy ignition into a heightened state and the broadcasting of that state to everyone in range. Her own self-diagnosis, recorded by Olcott, was that her brief disastrous marriage had been karmic punishment for "her awful pride and combativeness," qualities she said impeded her spiritual development. Note the structure of that confession: even her faults are dramatized and folded into a cosmic grand narrative of the soul's progress.
What Blavatsky wanted was not only power over a room or admiration of her person (as happens with some of the more "descending" SEE's) but a global, romantic cause to stand at the center of, and Theosophy is exactly that. Her own motto for the Society was lofty and absolute:
"There is no religion higher than Truth."
And her stated conception of martyrdom shows the engine underneath:
"There is often greater martyrdom to live for the love of, whether man or an ideal, than to die."
Blavatsky staged phenomena: raps, bells, letters that materialized and fell from the ceiling, objects produced from nowhere. The Coulomb affair later turned up sliding panels in her rooms at Adyar, India. Annie Bezant insisted that Blavatsky's accusers had constructed all this without her knowledge. Olcott, loyal and clear-eyed at once, conceded that "in order to gain converts to Theosophy, she felt obliged to appear to perform miracles," and that her methods were "on several occasions detected as fraudulent." Her stagecraft was always in service of the doctrine: the miracles were evidence for Theosophy, proof that the hidden laws were real and that she was their channel. This is the EIE's theatricality, speaking and acting beautifully, taking up as much space as possible before the public, to make converts believe in a system, not merely to win personal applause. The fraud, such as it was, was the fraud of a prophet manufacturing signs, not a charmer cadging admiration. It is the difference between an ideologue and a smooth operator, and Blavatsky, unlike some other debunked XIX-century spiritualists, was unmistakably the former. Interestingly, despite the general dislike of New Age and the overall tone of spiritual woo she founded, I don't have a particularly negative reaction to the flavor of her own writing. For all her posture and pseudo-scientific pretensions, Blavatsky strikes me as someone who was truly curious about the world to the degree other "mystic" characters, like her in most respects, are not.
"Mme. Blavatsky was not always accurate or methodical in her writing or thinking," admitted Olcott. The Secret Doctrine and Isis Unveiled are not systematized treatises. They are vast, digressive cascades, a torrent of Sanskrit, Tibetan, Kabbalistic, Hermetic, and evolutionary material poured together under enormous emotional pressure. This is precisely what one would expect of an EIE doctrine: the writing's force, while not completely alien to basic systematization, is mostly rhetorical and visionary rather than logically demonstrative. She was a high-energy organizer who crossed continents and founded institutions, not an IEI-like person of quiet contemplation.
Theosophy's omnivorous synthesis — Hindu and Buddhist terminology welded to "as above, so below" Western esotericism, Darwinian evolution recast as spiritual ascent, the whole comparative-mythology grab-bag bent into one cosmology — shows some Ne-flavored originality and maybe a small ILE accent. So is the lust for travels and the itinerant, novelty-hungry life — Russia, Cairo, New York, India, the alleged (I don't think it's certainly known whether it was actually real) penetration of Tibet where "no European foot has ever trodden". And so is the cheerful provocation of respectable opinion, even if a "pure" EIE also likes to épater la bourgeoisie sometimes: she named her London journal Lucifer, "to bring to light the hidden things of darkness," a deliberate two fingers to Christian sensibility. But the accent is average at most. It furnishes some of the raw intellectual material, but does not account for the prophet-martyr pose which clearly was dear to her heart, or the emotional weather she generated wherever she went. That's why I have to agree with the WSS verdict on her (EIE) and disagree with Talanov positing ILE as the main type.
She built an eclectic religion out of borrowed sources and sheer prophetic will, made bitter enemies and devoted friends on every continent she touched, and cast herself, to the last, as the one who would live in martyrdom for an ideal. Whether the hidden masters were fiction or not, her desire to stand at the center of a world-transforming drama was real.
Comments
Post a Comment